Healdsburg Goldendoodle turned following on social media into charitable sock drive

Yes, Smith Story Wine Cellars is known for great wine. Yes, co-owners Alison and Eric Story are regarded as some of the nicest and friendliest people in the business. But as the brand gets ready to celebrate its 10th anniversary in early 2024, it’s impossible to overlook the importance of a furry four-legged icon in the narrative arc.

That character: A white, 83-pound goldendoodle named Lord Sandwich.

Lord Sandwich has been with Smith Story Wine Cellars since the very beginning — technically he joined the Story family about a year before the wine label even started in 2013.

He has supported his owners through the early years and was a part of the move from the Anderson Valley to Healdsburg. He helped the family endure COVID-19. Sandwich stood by Alison’s side as she beat breast cancer in 2021-2022. Today, Lord Sandwich is as much of a fixture in the winery’s Bacchus Landing Way tasting room as his humans are.

“I’ve learned where I sit on the pecking order,” joked Eric, owner and winemaker at Smith Story Wine Cellars. “People come to the tasting room, and they say, ‘Is Sandwich here?’ or, ‘Is Ali here?’ It goes down from there.”

Alison, who handles sales and marketing, agreed that the dog has become the face of the brand.

“Everyone who visits our tasting room leaves with a big smile on their face, and that’s because of Sandwich; I mean, just saying his name — Lord Sandwich — makes you smile,” she said. “If you’re a fine wine person and a dog person you’re one of our people. And it turns out that covers a whole lot of people.”

Launching a four-legged legend

Alison and Eric started the Smith Story Wine Cellars in 2014, when Lord Sandwich was about 2 years old.

They even started an Instagram page for Lord Sandwich — a page Alison ran entirely on her own. Every time she’d post a photo, she’d write the caption in a voice she had created for Sandwich. The voice was self-deprecating but sincere and people loved it. In the early days the dog had tens of thousands of followers.

To say these followers were committed would be an understatement. When Alison shared that she and Eric were raising money on the crowdfunding site Kickstarter to start the winery, Lord Sandwich fans turned out in a big way. Of the 150 people who supported that initial campaign, roughly half were total strangers who only knew the Storys because they followed @SandwichtheDoodle on Instagram.

“People loved him from the very beginning,” Alison said of Sandwich. “He became this sort of cult hero. It was amazing.”

One of the reasons Lord Sandwich had such a following: philanthropy.

In December 2014, when Lord Sandwich was a puppy, he loved stealing and playing with socks, and Alison thought it might be fun to build this habit into a charitable campaign: Every time one of Lord Sandwich’s followers posted a picture of their dogs with socks on their paws, using #SocksforSandwich, Smith Story Wine Cellars would give a new pair to those in need.

Within the first week, Alison counted more than 500 posts of other animals showing socks. A movement was born.

Bombas, the sock company who’s mission is to donate products to those in need, caught wind of these efforts and donated thousands of pairs of socks to the family’s cause. By 2016, Smith Story Wine Cellars had become a serious funnel for individuals and others interested in donating socks to those who need them. Center for Domestic Peace in San Rafael was the first organization to receive the donated socks. Later, Alison and Lord Sandwich would walk around downtown San Rafael to hand out socks to unhoused people. On Instagram and in real life, the program became known as “Socks for Sandwich.” To date, Lord Sandwich has inspired people to give more than 50,000 pairs of socks to nonprofits like Social Advocates for Youth, Reach for Home, Corazón Healdsburg, Fort Bragg Food Bank and more. And the fundraisers continue during the holiday season and send boxes of socks on request.

Legend grows beyond Wine Country

Despite Lord Sandwich’s star value, the Storys were hesitant to put him on the label. They didn’t want to do something that might pigeonhole their annual supply of nearly 2,000 cases of wine as “critter wine.”

As demand among fans for a Lord Sandwich wine intensified, however, the Storys reconsidered.

In 2017, they released a Lord Sandwich red blend and a Lord Sandwich sauvignon blanc. The wine sold out almost instantly. The Storys linked the Lord Sandwich wine to a formal charity under the Socks for Sandwich name. Today, Smith Story Wine Cellars makes about 3,000 cases of Lord Sandwich wine annually and for every bottle of Lord Sandwich wine the winery sells, the charity donates another pair of new socks.

That same year, when Smith Story Wine Cellars opened a small tasting room in Mendocino County’s Anderson Valley, fans would come from all over the country to taste the wine, buy Lord Sandwich wine and meet the legend himself.

In February 2018, Lord Sandwich and the movement he inspired were the subject of a feature in the Washington Post.

Sandwich eventually caught the attention of Craig McGill, publisher of the book series, “Wine Dogs of California.” To date, the Smith Story Wine Cellars goldendoodle has graced the book’s cover for three different editions: 2017, 2019 and 2023.

McGill said Lord Sandwich is the ultimate spokesdog.

"Lord Sandwich is a dream to photograph,” McGill wrote in a recent email. “He’s intelligent, inquisitive and sensitive. It makes our job so much easier when you have a canine model that trusts you and will pretty much do anything you ask of them. Add his natural ’X-Factor’ and he is so cover-worthy. We always walk away after photographing Sandwich and say he’s just a nice guy in a dog suit."

'We bent but did not break’

Lord Sandwich hasn’t only guided the Storys through good times, he’s supported them through tough times, too.

The COVID-19 pandemic hit the Anderson Valley hard, and Smith Story was forced to hand-deliver wine from March to September 2020. In the beginning of 2021, Alison unexpectedly received a diagnosis of breast cancer — a journey that necessitated five surgeries, five months of chemotherapy and six weeks of radiation treatment to overcome.

“ (The pandemic was) difficult in ways we never imagined,” Alison said. “We bent but did not break.”

Throughout this turbulence, throughout those exhausting and difficult days of cancer treatment, Lord Sandwich provided hope.

Finally, toward the end of 2021, things started looking up. The Storys caught wind of an available tasting room space at the Bacchus Landing Way facility in Healdsburg, and they seized the opportunity to open a new location in Sonoma County. They signed a lease and opened the current spot in November. Then they made the decision to close the Philo tasting room at the end of that year.

Julie Rothberg, founder and owner of the Odyssey Wine Academy that also operates out of Bacchus Landing Way, was the friend who tipped off Alison to the open tasting space. She said Lord Sandwich was front-of-mind when she facilitated the connection.

“Ali has discovered the connection between those who love animals, especially dogs, and those who love wine,” Rothberg said “More than anything, Lord Sandwich is an accessible, expertly crafted wine that allows anyone who opens a bottle to feel a bit more connected, a bit more loved, and a bit more a part of a sweet dog’s world.”

Sandwich meets Soup

Now that Lord Sandwich and his namesake wine brand are household names (the dog recently eclipsed 80,000 followers on Instagram), Smith Story Wine Cellars is poised to catapult the brand into the stratosphere.

Eric said he and Alison have been talking to larger wineries that might be interested in partnerships or other collaborations that could enable Lord Sandwich’s wines to be produced at much larger quantities and distributed on a national scale.

According to Alison, demand currently exists for more than 40,000 cases annually.

The Storys said they’d even be willing to spin off and sell the Lord Sandwich label entirely, so long as they could remain intimately involved with the resulting operation.

In a poetic twist, Lord Sandwich himself recently got a new sidekick — a 10-month-old black goldendoodle named Sir Royal Soup. As a duo, the dogs are named Soup and Sandwich. And together, Alison said the lovable brand ambassadors will help Smith Story Wine Cellars take on whatever comes next.

“It’s an exciting time to be a fresh and sparkly and meaningful brand in this business when there are lot of brands that have zero human story or anything meaningful behind them beside a label slapped on,” she said. “Smith Story has become that winery with a big heart and gumption and determination. We really feel like ours is an All-American story. Sandwich and now Soup are an integral part.”